The trigger systems of digital storage oscilloscopes (DSOs) and other test and measurement devices may be set to trigger on simple events, such as edge and signal levels, as well as more complex events, such as glitch, slew-rate violation, abnormal pulse width, runt pulse and the like which could indicate, for example, a timing violation within a device under test (DUT) or other anomalous event. The only indication of how many such violations are occurring is the acquisition rate of the DSO, which does not measure the actual rate of occurrence of the specified trigger event. The acquisition rate of the DSO may be thousands of times slower than the trigger event rate, and a, user would never know it.